Seeing Calvin Coolidge as a Dream
John Derbyshire, author of, among other things, a very fine novel on a Chinese emigre’s obsession with our most Taoist of presidents, reviews Cult of the Presidency today on NRO. He likes it, and quotes from it liberally. Riffing off the book’s discussion of sycophantic White House staffers, he writes:
I have not so far heard that White House functionaries walk backwards away from the Presidential Presence, as is done in the royal courts of Britain and Japan, or get down on their knees and knock their heads on the floor in a full formal kowtow, as was the rule in Imperial China, but surely such protocols cannot be many years away.
That republican manners have decayed to a level of servility that would have embarrassed Elagabalus, is bad enough. That modern conservatives have accepted, even helped enable the process, is very depressing indeed. The belief in existential danger is no excuse. Even if we are all going to be murdered by fanatical terrorists, which I don’t for a moment believe, let’s at least die like free citizens of a free republic.
Derbyshire also writes
The thing most painful to recall is that when George W. Bush was running for the presidency in 2000, many of us believed and hoped that he would be an inconsequential president in the style of those bewhiskered late 19th-century snoozers. Bush’s affable mediocrity seemed well suited to another long spell of peace and prosperity.
I know exactly what he means. Part of me thinks there’s an alternate universe somewhere where the Twin Towers are standing, and George W. Bush became the sort of president about whom you could say, as Mencken did of Coolidge “he had no ideas and was not a nuisance”–that is, a great president.
-
Search
Currently Consuming
2 Responses to “Seeing Calvin Coolidge as a Dream”
Posted by: Greg N. - 05/06/2008
Gene,
I haven’t finished the book yet, so I apologize if these questions are covered. Anyway, in the book you reference a lot of stories about progressives’ use of crises to push their agenda of centralization of power. Do you see a parallel between that process, and what Naomi Klein alleges of Milton Friedman/ libertarians in “The Shock Doctrine”?
Also, what do you think accounts for progressives who profess to despise presidential power as exercised by this administration, but who come from the philosophical heritage that made it possible? Is it cognitive dissonance, pure political pragmatism, or something more legitimate?
Again, congrats on the book; it’s awesome (as expected).
Posted by: Gene - 05/07/2008
I haven’t, and won’t, read NK, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with advancing your ideas in times of crisis, as long as they’re good ideas. On the second question, I don’t think the intellectual heirs of the progressives are any longer the leading proponents of unrestrained presidential power, even when their team holds the White House. Vietnam really did change them, and when Newt Gingrich tried to repeal the War Powers Resolution during the Clinton administration, I believe he got more Republican votes than Dem votes. So it’s not all partisan politics, situational constitutionalism notwithstanding.
Leave a Reply of Your Own